The concept of skills

Learners’ character traits determine the individual's way of interacting with his or her environment and behaviour as well as their ability to apply knowledge, solves problems to complete tasks. Learners’ acquisition of skills are cognitive (logical, intuitive and creative thinking) and/or practical (dexterity and ability to use methods, materials, tools). A holistic approach should be followed within when designing the curriculum in depth by taking into account of four dimensions of education, knowledge skill, character and metacognition. Achieving a balance between current and traditional subjects in light of interdisciplinary relations is important. When the information is used, it becomes a skill and combined with the information, it finds itself only in the feedback loop. Furthermore, metacognition contributes to the process of expressing itself as it is and learning to learn itself and the creation of three other dimensions (^{DE CORTE, 2003}; ^{BIALIK; FADEL; TRILLING, 2015}).

Skills are classified as disciplinary/interdisciplinary or basic/upper level. They are built on the abilities existing ones individuals acquired and also or can be discovered, developed or hindered during education. The provision of quality education service can determine the successful development or loss of an individual’s abilities and skills. Individuals differ in their learning abilities, styles and strategies. It is important to focus on identifying each individual’ strength and weaknesses before attempting to improve one’s skills. It is equally important to deal with multiple disciplines while dealing with multiple skills during configuration of the curricula by taking into an account of the concept of interdisciplinary skills and pay attention to the holistic skills that the individual needs, instead of singular skills (^{KARADEMIR, 2017}).

Features of skills

Skill is a concept with several features. Some of these features are as follows (^{OECD, 2005}; ^{GUNES, 2012}; ^{KARADEMIR, 2017}):

The skill has a complex content and includes intertwined knowledge, practice, attitudes, methods, etc. required to integrate during the implementation. The complex structure of the skill requires careful planning when preparing and teaching. The quality of education has a direct impact on the development of skills.

The acquisition of skills is an ever-evolving process and is not restricted beyond formal education. It is developed throughout life and varies on the age and level of education. Skill development activities need to be based on the student's prior knowledge as well as on performing new learning with various forms of interactions in mind to identify and foster individual’ skills.

Skill is a structure that stems from individuals' past lives and emerges in the future. It also arises from the need to create possible situations for future events and can indicate future behaviour: For this reason, the student/individual should be encouraged become autonomous and learn to learn on his own

The skill should be handled holistically. The main factor in skill training is to deal with an event/job/situation in its entirety. A situation called half or missing skill cannot be considered. This occurs both in life itself and while performing a profession (^{BISSONNETTE; RICHARD, 2001}).

Skills in education: 21st century skills

As seen in Table 1, it is possible to divide the skills into two parts in general context.

The skills can be divided into two parts. See Table 1. The skills, knowledge and expertise students must master to succeed in work and life; is a blend of content knowledge, specific skills, expertise and literacies. Each 21st-century skills implementation requires the development of key academic subject knowledge and understanding among all students. Those who can think critically and communicate effectively must build on a base of key academic subject knowledge

4C at 21st century skills: Collaboration, Communication, Critical Thinking and Creativity

SOURCE: Photos taken from royalty-free site Pixabay.com.

Creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills must be considered in a holistic and interrelated way, not individually and separately within education systems. To develop them as a whole interdisciplinary method must be used. There are many interdisciplinary methods and techniques. Context The four C’s of 21st Century skills provide students with a broad perspective. The success of students in both their lessons and their lives depends on developing these skills. It is important for students to use these skills together as a whole in order to gain experience in daily life. Critical thinking teaches students to question claims and seeks the truth, creativity teaches students to think in a way that’s unique to them, collaborating provide students with the opportunity work together and accomplish larger tasks and communicating teaches students how to convey ideas. Based approaches are also one of these methods and techniques, creating a model intertwined with real-world problems in skills education. It is inevitable to use creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication skills in the solutions of these real problems in education systems. In these cases, both teachers and students play an important part in developing and mastering these skills.

TABLE 2 21ST CENTURY SKİLLS AND DEFİNİTİONS 

Skills	Sub-skills	Definitions
Learning & Innovation Skills	Critical Thinking & Problem Solving	Rational reasoning and difficult choices; understanding relationships between systems Ability to identify, examine and solve problems
	Creativity & Innovation	Developing, implementing and sharing new ideas with others; willing to be open to new and different perspectives. Elaborate, refine, analyze and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts
	Communication & Collaboration	Understanding, using and preparing effective verbal, written and multimedia communication tools in different forms and environments. Team work and leadership; adapting to different roles and responsibilities; efficient work with others; putting yourself in the shoes of others; respecting different differences
Information, Media & Technology Skills	Information Literacy	Analyze, access, use, adapt, evaluate and create information in different shapes and environments
	Media Literacy
	ICT (Information, Communications & Technology) Literacy
Life & Career Skills	Flexibility & Adaptability	Fulfilling individual responsibility and flexibility in personal, business and public; setting and achieving high standards and goals for one's self and others
	Initiative & Self-Direction	Understanding her/himself and following own learning needs; identifying appropriate resources; transfer learning from one field to another
	Social & Cross-Cultural Skills	Acting responsibly, keeping in mind the interests and rights of others; displaying ethical behavior in personal, business and public
	Productivity & Accountability
	Leadership & Responsibility

SOURCE: Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2003).

As seen Table 2;

People in the 21st century live with technology and media-driven environment, marked by various characteristics. They have access to an abundance of information, rapid changes in technology tools, and the ability to collaborate and make individual contributions on an unprecedented scale. Increasingly, the governments and the businesses require citizens and workers of the 21st century to exhibit a range of functional and critical thinking skills related to information, media and technology.

Learning and innovation skills are increasingly recognized as those that separate students who are prepared for more and more complex situations and work environments in the 21st century and those who are not. Creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration skills as essentials in preparing students for the future (PARTNERSHIP FOR 21ST CENTURY SKILLS, 2013).

SOURCE: Partnership for 21st Century Skills (2013).

FİGURE 1 21ST CENTURY STUDENT OUTCOMES 

Figure 1 represents each element distinctly for descriptive purposes. The components are fully interconnected in the process of 21st-century teaching and learning. The elements describe the critical systems necessary to ensure 21st-century readiness for every student. 21st century standards, assessments, curriculum, instruction, continuous professional development and learning environments must be aligned to produce 21st-century outcomes for today’s students.

Creativity as a skill

The definition of creativity has changed over the years. Researchers describe the phenomenon of creativity, that varies according to many different ideas and approaches, including different expressions such as a reflection of intelligence, an unconscious process, problem-solving capacity, and an act of thinking based on a connotation. (^{MACKINNON, 1962}; ^{GUILFORD; HENDRICKS; HOEPFNER, 1968}; ^{KOBERG; BAGNALL, 2003}; ^{MALAGA, 2000}; ^{ADAMS, 2001}) Creativity also is seen as an individual way of thinking and quantitatively examine creative personality, the ability of the individual to grasp, through psychometric approaches. (^{TORRANCE, 1972}). Weis (1993), defined creativity as using the mind to create new ideas, giving the mind a new shape, using the mind to create something new, doing something new, producing new ideas using imagination, designing something new, something new is inventing. Some researchers examine creativity, on the basis of organizational or social factors and examine how these factors affect creativity (^{ARGYRIS; SCHÖN, 1996}). In 2004 a new definition was proposed by ^{Plucker, Beghetto, and Dow (2004}) , defining creativity as the interaction among aptitude, process, and the environment by which an individual or group produces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context.” A generally agreed definition of creativity was proposed by Chung (2012) and ^{Hennessey and Amabile (2010}), defining creativity which involves the development of a novel product, idea, or problem-solution that is of value to the individual and/or the larger social group.” Others, who base their research, on tests and measurements, used to measure and improve their creative performance on individual creativity and the information process in the mind (^{TORRANCE, 1972}; ^{WEISER, 1993}; ^{KARADEMIR, 2016}; ^{ONUR; ZORLU, 2017}).

The creative person gradually discovers unknown places through the ways everyone knows. In other words, creates different / unknown / unexplored events or products by using the common way / methods / techniques. The creative process begins with wondering and dreaming. One cannot produce solutions to a problem without dreaming. For this reason, it is necessary to plan educational activities in a way that increases students' skills in order to transform their creativity skills into a higher skill. In doing so, it is important not to allow educational activities to prevent and reduce creativity.

^{Arenofsky (2000}), identified reasons that prevent creativity and its development. These are listed as follows:

When dealing with factors that negatively affect creativity, it is necessary to consider the characteristics of the creative person.

SOURCE: ^{Onur and Zorlu (2017}).

FIGURE 2 RELATİON BETWEEN CRATİVİTİY AND CREATİVE PERSON 

According to Figure 2, the characteristics of the creative person has a feature that can be improved. A creative person is someone, who has the ability to synthesis by being curious and patient and make discoveries by being adventurous with experiments and research. (^{USTUNDAG, 2002}).

^{Wechsler (1991}), ^{Piske et al. (2014}), ^{Bahia and Trindade (2013}) indicate ways to work with creative potential, focusing on freedom of expression during the teaching and on mutual respect, which can generate opportunities to recognize the different opportunities during the process of teaching and learning. These include:

Teachers work with many types of students in the process of revealing their creative skills in the classroom. While some of these students are at normal level, some of them are gifted students.

SOURCE: ^{Renzulli (1999}).

FİGURE 3 THE TALENT POOL RESULTİNG FROM THE İNTERACTİON OF THE COMPONENTS LEADİNG TO BEİNG GİFTED 

According to the model in Figure 1, individuals having these three circles are considered as gifted and expected to have special training (^{AKKANAT, 2012}). As seen in the model, creativity is an important component of gifted behaviour features. "Creativity is a mental and socio-cultural environment-related skill found in all individuals at any age rather than being seen as a supernatural ability, a mystical and a random God’s gift power under the monopoly of a limited- number gifted people in society. Creativity is composed of at least four basic components. These are; creative process, creative product, creative individual and creative case. Creativity is often an important aspect of scientific talent. Problem-solving, generating hypotheses, designing experiments and technical innovations require a special form of the unique creativity of science. If gifted students are to be helped in finding their creative intersection, significant and fundamental changes must be made to the way that educators think about teaching and learning (^{HENNESSEY, 2004}; ^{KARADEMIR, 2016}).

It is vital that the teaching staff is prepared to create a stimulating environment of creativity that awakens the interest of gifted students and increase motivation to learn. For this, teachers need to know the interests and specificities of their students, for example, if the student likes drawing, it is important that the activities focus on drawing, if the student likes doing researches, then the activities involving researches are essential for this student to learn. In general, working with art can be a good option to develop creativity (^{PISKE et al., 2016}b).

Creativity at gifted students

Scientific creativity comprises of product, trait and process. “Product” depends on the technical product, science knowledge, science phenomena and science problem and trait is evaluated by three structures named fluency, flexibility and originality. In scientific creativity; the process depends on imagination and thinking (^{HU; ADEY, 2002}).

Gifted student, learning faster than their peers; is an individual who is the leader in creativity, art and leadership capacity, has special academic skills, can understand abstract ideas, likes to act independently in his interests and performs at a high level (^{MNE, 2016}). In addition, it expresses the ability to create something special and a combination of all these features, different from their peers in terms of giftedness, creativity, motivation and mental superiority (^{KOCAK; ICMENOGLU, 2012}). For this reason, gifted students are expected to gain creative thinking, discovery, invention, success in social relations, innovation, leadership, communication and artistic skills (^{MNE, 2016}).

Gifted children are those individuals who have a high level of performance in areas related to mental, creative or leadership capacity, or in specific academic fields and who need special training to develop their abilities (^{DAVASLIGIL, 2004}). Furthermore, giftedness includes “high-level talent”, “creativity” and “motivation” (^{RENZULLI, 1999}).

Although the definition of giftedness has been expanded and narrowed over time, we must take into account the different kinds of skills in the education of gifted when using the concepts of "difference" and "creativity" in every definition. A skill can be acquired, developed, or extinguished unless training is carried out. The more skills are identified, the easier it is to reach the basic goals of education by students and teachers. The concept of creativity is often confused with the concept of intelligence. Creative people are those who have multi-faceted thinking skills rather than those with high intelligence. However, these two concepts are different from each other. Intelligence is essential for creativity but not sufficient (^{LIN et al., 2003}). Even if creative people are generally intelligent, intelligent individuals may not always be creative in everything.

Gifted students require different teaching methods and techniques than their peers. Since these students learn faster and in different ways, the curriculum needs to be differentiated to meet the needs of the gifted. Curriculum differentiation is created to foster the development of the creative skills of gifted students in curriculum design, enrichment, extension, acceleration (^{TORTOP, 2015}).

In-class practice: The determination of creativity skills in gifted students

The main purpose of this study is to identify the creativity extent of gifted students through the in class practice. For this purpose, students were asked to design products that would make their lives easier. In accordance with this purpose; students have been asked to design projects and their adequacy to the extent of creativity has been determined. Adequacy of students’ project designs have been tried to be explained according to fluency subscale, originality subscale and flexibility subscale, which was defined by ^{Hu and Adey (2002}), through teacher (researcher) observations and project products.

In this in-class practice, it was observed that creativity skills changed in the context of different dimensions within the scope of the project studies carried out by gifted primary school students. The change and development of gifted students' creativity in the context of the creativity dimensions specified by ^{Hu and Adey (2002}) have been observed. In long-term studies of students in this context; The formation of skills may require a certain process. while this process takes a few lessons in some skills, some may take a long time. therefore, skills should be followed and evaluated in the process. A study is carried out in a wide perspective on the formation of skills (^{KARADEMIR, 2016}), This article covers the part about creativity skills.

The theory of in-class practice

As seen Figure 4, according to ^{Hu and Adey (2002}); scientific creativity has three parts named product, trait and process. “Product” depends on technical product, science knowledge, science phenomena and science problem. Trait is evaluated by three structure named fluency, flexibility and originality. In a scientific creativity; process depends on imagination and thinking.

SOURCE: ^{Hu and Adey (2002}) and ^{Karademir (2016}).

FIGURE 4 THE SCİENTİFİC STRUCTURE CREATİVİTY MODEL 

Fluency: It is to be able to generate many ideas that may be the answer to a problem. For example, finding different uses of a brick or finding suitable titles for a short story. Creative people can put forward a number of ideas as a solution to the problem (^{HU; ADEY, 2002}). For example; a student producing 10 different solutions to a problem situation in 5 minutes has more fluency and greater creativity skill than a student producing 5 solutions at the same time (^{RAHMAN, 1999}).

Flexibility: It is to be able to bring different perspectives on an issue, to reveal different dimensions, to generate ideas in different categories, to approach a situation from different perspectives. The more generated ideas deal the problem with different angles, the higher is the flexibility. Creative people offer solutions to problems from different perspevtives (^{HU; ADEY, 2002}). The flexibility of a student to move from one approach to another is related to the condition of using different intellectual strategies. A child with a very low level of flexibility shows a strict pattern of thinking. However, a child who has excessive flexibility can pass from one approach to another (^{SUNGUR, 1997}).

Originality: It is the case of being unique in thought and action. It is considered that the fewer people think of the generated idea, the more original it is. Creative people generate original ideas (^{HU; ADEY, 2002}).

Determining the expected / targeted skills and sub-skills

In the determination of skills section, practice related to skills containing different disciplines have been realized. The suitability of the multi-skill students with the feedback obtained from the gifted students after the study has been demonstrated. As seen Table 3; expected / targeted life skills. It is seen how the target skills are revealed after the activity before the event. This table may differ depending on the skills targeted at the activity. For example, this table can be used for scientific process skills and its sub-skills.

Process of the Activity and Evaluation Stages

In this study conducted with gifted students, an environment was provided to enable students to think design-oriented. In this context, a discussion was made to reveal the problems they encountered in their own lives. After this discussion, they were provided to create draft drawings of original products that they will primarily reveal. An example of student drawings is shown in figure 5. Afterwards, they were provided to introduce their drawings. They focused on additions and subtractions, and they did research. At the last stage, they finished their designs and turned them into products. Observations were made to identify their skills at all stages from beginning to end. In their presentations about their products, they explained their originality, fluency and flexibility.

SOURCE: This image was taken and edited by the author as part of the research.

FİGURE 5 A PRODUCT SAMPLE OF GİFTED ELEMENTARY STUDENTS: SELF-PASTE TOOTBRUSH 

As seen in Table 4; Some behaviors of students and some features and skills of their products are matched. These behaviors and features are specified through observations and evaluations made in the process.

Results of Practice

In this study; It is seen that students’ creativity has changed positively in creating products and using these products in daily life. As a dimensions of creativity; in the Fluency dimension of creativity, students show positive development; in the Flexibility dimension of creativity, students show positive development and in the Originality dimension of creativity, students show positive development. The creativity of gifted students has been found to increase with the training provided on product creation processes.